The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10601
Giovanni Vacca
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Giovanni Enrico Eugenio Vacca was an Italian mathematician, Sinologist and historian of science. Vacca studied mathematics and graduated from the University of Genoa in 1897 under the guidance of G. B. Negri. He was a politically active student and was banished for that from Genoa in 1897. He moved to Turin and became an assistant to Giuseppe Peano. In 1899 he studied, at Hanover, unpublished manuscripts of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which he published in 1903. Around 1898 Vacca became interested in Chinese language and culture after attending a Chinese exhibition in Turin. He took private lessons of Chinese and continued to study it at the University of Florence.
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Ernst Barthel
1890 - 1953 (63 years)
Ernst Philipp Barthel was an Alsace philosopher, mathematician, and inventor. In the 1920s and 1930s he taught as a Privatdozent of philosophy at the University of Cologne. From 1924 on Barthel edited the magazine Antäus. Blätter für neues Wirklichkeitsdenken , which served as the organ of the Gesellschaft für Lebensphilosophie founded by him in Cologne.
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Joseph Ser
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Joseph Ser was a French mathematician, of whom little was known till now. He published 45 papers between 1900 and 1954, among which four monographs, edited in Paris by Henry Gauthier-Villars. In the main, he worked on number theory and infinite series.
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Josif Shtokalo
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Josif Zakharovich Shtokalo was a famous Ukrainian mathematician. Shtokalo worked mainly in the areas of differential equations, operational calculus and the history of mathematics. Investigation of the Stability of Lindstedt's Equation Using Shtokalo’s Method by Samuel Kohn contains a description of Shotkalo's method in English.
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James Wood
1760 - 1839 (79 years)
James Wood was a mathematician, and Master of St John's College, Cambridge. In his later years he was Dean of Ely. Life Wood was born in Holcombe, Bury where his father ran an evening school and taught his son the elements of arithmetic and algebra. From Bury Grammar School he proceeded to St John's College, Cambridge in 1778, graduating as senior wrangler in 1782. On graduating he became a fellow of the college and in his long tenure there produced several successful academic textbooks for students of mathematics. Between 1795 and 1799 his The principles of mathematics and natural philosophy, was printed, in four volumes, by J.
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François Proth
1852 - 1879 (27 years)
François Proth was a French self-taught mathematician farmer who lived in Vaux-devant-Damloup near Verdun, France. He stated four primality-related theorems. The most famous of these, Proth's theorem, can be used to test whether a Proth number is prime. The numbers passing this test are called Proth primes; they continue to be of importance in the computational search for large prime numbers.
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Johannes de Groot
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
Johannes de Groot was a Dutch mathematician, the leading Dutch topologist for more than two decades following World War II. Biography De Groot was born at Garrelsweer, a village in the municipality of Loppersum, Groningen, on May 7, 1914. He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1942 under the supervision of Gerrit Schaake. He studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy as an undergraduate, and began his graduate studies concentrating in algebra and algebraic geometry, but switched to point set topology, the subject...
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Ruggiero Torelli
1884 - 1915 (31 years)
Ruggiero Torelli was an Italian mathematician who introduced Torelli's theorem, a classical result of algebraic geometry over the complex number field. Publications See also Torelli group External links BiographyBiography in Italian
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Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann was a German historian of mathematics, known for his research on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Life and work After graduating from high school in 1919 at the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich, Hofmann studied at University of Munich with Walther von Dyck and George Faber, gaining Ph.D. in 1927. He was briefly an assistant in Munich and Darmstadt, before he went into the teaching profession in Gunzburg, Nördlingen.
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Isamu Noguchi
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
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Octav Mayer
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Octav Mayer was a Romanian mathematician, the first to earn a doctorate in Romania. Born in Mizil, Prahova County, Mayer went to the primary school in Târgu Neamț and pursued his studies in an elementary school in Focșani. He then went to the National College in Iași, where he obtained his baccalaureate, and then studied mathematics at the University of Iași, where he obtained his undergraduate degree. In 1915, Mayer enrolled in the and took part in the battles on the Romanian front in World War I from 1916 to 1918. After the war, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Iași in 1920; his...
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Ferdinand Magellan
1480 - 1521 (41 years)
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage thereafter bearing his name and achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific.
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Jan Rajewski
1857 - 1906 (49 years)
Jan Rajewski was a professor of the University of Lviv. He was a mathematician. External links Mathematics at Lviv University
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Jacob Struve
1755 - 1841 (86 years)
Jacob Struve was a German mathematician and father of the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve. Jacob Struve was born in 1755, in Horst, Holstein. He was the youngest of the four children of Johann Struve and Abel Strüven . From a young age he had to work in the fields, but he also received lessons in Latin, German, English and in mathematics, which he liked most. From 1771 till 1775 he studied at the Christianeum High School in Altona, then part of both Denmark and Germany. Starting from 1775, he entered the University of Göttingen and attended mathematics lectures of Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, which were rather popular among students, including Struve.
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Binyamin Amirà
1896 - 1968 (72 years)
Binyamin A. Amirà was an Israeli mathematician. Biography Born in 1896 in Mohilev, Russian Empire, Binyamin Amirà emigrated with his family to Tel Aviv in Ottoman Palestine in 1910, where he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium. Amirà went on to study mathematics at the University of Geneva, after which he moved to the University of Göttingen in 1921 to undertake research for his doctorate under the supervision of Edmund Landau.
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Pierre Frédéric Sarrus
1798 - 1861 (63 years)
Pierre Frédéric Sarrus was a French mathematician. Sarrus was a professor at the University of Strasbourg, France and a member of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris . He is the author of several treatises, including one on the solution of numeric equations with multiple unknowns ; one on multiple integrals and their integrability conditions; and one on the determination of the orbits of the comets. He also discovered a mnemonic rule for solving the determinant of a 3-by-3 matrix, named Sarrus' scheme. Sarrus also demonstrated the fundamental lemma of the calculus of variations.
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Carsten Niebuhr
1733 - 1815 (82 years)
Carsten Niebuhr, or Karsten Niebuhr , was a German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark. He is renowned for his participation in the Danish Arabia expedition . He was the father of the Danish-German statesman and historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who published an account of his father's life in 1817.
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William Philip Hiern
1839 - 1925 (86 years)
William Philip Hiern was a British mathematician and botanist. Life Hiern attended St. John's College, Cambridge, from 1857 to 1861 and attained a "first class degree" in mathematics. Later, in 1886, he attended Oxford University.
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Robert Simpson Woodward
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Robert Simpson Woodward was an American civil engineer, physicist and mathematician. Biography He was born at Rochester, Michigan, on July 21, 1849, to Lysander Woodward and Peninah A. Simpson. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering at the University of Michigan in 1872. He was appointed assistant engineer on the United States Lake Survey. In 1882 he became assistant astronomer for the United States Transit of Venus Commission. In 1884 he became astronomer to the United States Geological Survey, serving until 1890, when he was hired by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall as assistant in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.
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Lorenzo Respighi
1824 - 1889 (65 years)
Lorenzo Respighi was an Italian mathematician and natural philosopher. Born at Cortemaggiore, Piacenza, to Luigi Respighi and Giuseppina Rossetti. He studied mathematics and natural philosophy, first at Parma and then at the University of Bologna, where he obtained his degree ad honorem in 1845. From 1855 to 1864 he was director of the Astronomic Observatory of Bologna, and during these years he discovered three comets, #1862 IV, #1863 III and #1863 V. In 1865 he was nominated director of the Astronomic Observatory of the Campidoglio, in Rome.
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Gabriel Sudan
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Gabriel Sudan was a Romanian mathematician, known for the Sudan function, an important example in the theory of computation, similar to the Ackermann function. Born in Bucharest, Sudan received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1925 for his thesis Über die geordneten Mengen , supervised by David Hilbert. He taught at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest from 1941 until his retirement, in 1966.
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Francesco Gerbaldi
1858 - 1934 (76 years)
Francesco Gerbaldi was an Italian geometer, who proved Gerbaldi's theorem. Gerbaldi studied at the University of Turin with laurea in 1879 and then became there an assistant to Enrico D'Ovidio. After further study in Germany, he was in Pavia and Rome before being appointed a professor at the University of Palermo. He was a colleague of Giovanni Guccia, the founder of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo. Guccia and Gerbaldi enhanced the reputation of the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Palermo by recruiting Giuseppe Bagnera, Michele De Franchis, Pasquale Calapso and Michele Cipolla. ...
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Henri Fehr
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Henri Fehr was a Swiss mathematician. He was the founder of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mathematical Sciences, of the journal "Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici" and of the journal "L'Enseignement mathématique" along with Charles-Ange Laisant. Fehr's interests in mathematics were scientific and social as is demonstrated by his involvement in academic life, committees for the improvement of mathematical instruction, education of teachers and internationalization of mathematics.
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William Neile
1637 - 1670 (33 years)
William Neile was an English mathematician and founder member of the Royal Society. His major mathematical work, the rectification of the semicubical parabola, was carried out when he was aged nineteen, and was published by John Wallis. By carrying out the determination of arc lengths on a curve given algebraically, in other words by extending to algebraic curves generally with Cartesian geometry a basic concept from differential geometry, it represented a major advance in what would become infinitesimal calculus. His name also appears as Neil.
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Ali Qushji
1403 - 1474 (71 years)
Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammed , known as Ali Qushji was a Turkic-müslims theologian, jurist, astronomer, mathematician and physicist, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472. As a disciple of Ulugh Beg, he is best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. In addition to his contributions to Ulugh Beg's famous work Zij-i-Sultani and to the founding of Sahn-ı Seman Medrese, one of the first cent...
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Jean-Marie Le Roux
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Jean-Marie Le Roux was a French applied mathematician. Le Roux, the son of farmers, studied at the University of Rennes and, possibly, at the University of Bordeaux. He was an instructor at Guingamp from 1882 to 1889, a professor at the lycée at Brest from 1889 to 1896, and a professor at the lycée at Montpellier from 1896 to 1898. At the University of Rennes he became in 1898 a maître de conférences and in 1902 a professor of applied mathematics. He retired there in 1933 as professor emeritus with the title of professeur honoraire. He passed his agrégation examination in mathematics in 1889....
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Fyodor Gakhov
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Fyodor Dmitriyevich Gakhov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and a specialist in the field of boundary value problems for analytic functions of a complex variable. Biography Fyodor Dmitriyevich Gakhov was born on 19 February 19 1906 in Batalpashinskaya village in the family of a shoemaker. His father died when he was a boy. After graduating from the Circassian Pedagogical College in 1925, he entered Gorsky Pedagogical Institute in Vladikavkaz.
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Campanus of Novara
1210 - 1296 (86 years)
Campanus of Novara was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and physician who is best known for his work on Euclid's Elements. In his writings he refers to himself as Campanus Nouariensis; contemporary documents refer to him as Magister Campanus; and the full style of his name is Magister Campanus Nouariensis. He is also referred to as Campano da Novara, Giovanni Campano or similar. Later authors sometimes applied the forename Johannes Campanus or Iohannes Campanus.
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Hu Dunfu
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Hu Dunfu was a Chinese mathematician and pioneer in higher education. He won a Qing government scholarship to study at Cornell University, and became the first dean of Tsinghua University at the age of 25. He was then briefly dean of Fudan University, before establishing Utopia University in 1912 and developing it into one of China's best private universities. He also served as head of the mathematics department of National Chiao Tung University and the first president of the Chinese Mathematical Society, which he co-founded in 1935.
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Lev Tumarkin
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Lev Abramovich Tumarkin was a Russian mathematician. He was dean of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. He was a student of Pavel Aleksandrov. He attended the First International Topological Conference in Moscow, 1935 as a host but made no presentation.
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Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov
1874 - 1926 (52 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Chuprov Russian Empire statistician who worked on mathematical statistics, sample survey theory and demography. Chuprov was born in Mosal'sk but grew up and was educated in Moscow where his father, Alexander Ivanovich , a distinguished economist and statistician, was a professor. Alexander Alexandrovich graduated from the physico-mathematical faculty of Moscow University in 1896 with a dissertation on "The theory of probability as the foundation of theoretical statistics." He spent the years 1897-1901 studying political economy in Germany, in Berlin and Strasbourg. H...
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Aimé Bonpland
1773 - 1858 (85 years)
Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland was a French explorer and botanist who traveled with Alexander von Humboldt in Latin America from 1799 to 1804. He co-authored volumes of the scientific results of their expedition.
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Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi
1135 - 1213 (78 years)
Sharaf al-Dīn al-Muẓaffar ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Muẓaffar al-Ṭūsī known more often as Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī or Sharaf ad-Dīn aṭ-Ṭūsī, was an Iranian mathematician and astronomer of the Islamic Golden Age .
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David Gibb
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
David Gibb FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He was the first person to use the term numerical integration. Life Gibb was born in Methil near Leven, Fife on 31 October 1883, the eldest son of Robert Gibb, a salt manufacturer, and his wife Joanna. He attended Leven Public School then George Watsons College in Edinburgh . He studied mathematics and sciences at the University of Edinburgh graduating in 1906 with a MA/BSc. While a student he lodged with a Mr Flockhart at 3 West Preston Street, Edinburgh. In 1909 he began lecturing in mathematics at the University.
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Gaston Milhaud
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Gaston Milhaud was a French philosopher and historian of science. Gaston Milhaud studied mathematics with Gaston Darboux at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1881 he took a teaching post at the University of Le Havre. In 1891 he became professor of mathematics at Montpellier University, and in 1895 became professor of philosophy there. In 1909 a chair in the history of philosophy in its relationship to the sciences was created for him at the Sorbonne. Milhaud's successor in the chair was Abel Rey.
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Cora Ratto de Sadosky
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Corina Eloísa Ratto de Sadosky was an Argentine mathematician, educator and militant activist in support of human and women's rights in Argentina and beyond. She played an important part in the Argentine University Federation supporting republican interests during the Spanish Civil War and helping victims of Falangist oppression. In 1941, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, she established and headed the anti-fascist Junta de la Victoria which stood for democracy and women's suffrage. In 1965, Ratto founded Columna 10, a journal denouncing the conduct of the United States in the Vietnam War.
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Whittaker Chambers
1901 - 1961 (60 years)
Whittaker Chambers was an American writer and intelligence agent. After early years as a Communist Party member and Soviet spy , he defected from the Soviet underground , worked for Time magazine , and then testified about the Ware Group in what became the Hiss case for perjury , often referred to as the trial of the century, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review . US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
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Pietro Cataldi
1548 - 1626 (78 years)
Pietro Antonio Cataldi was an Italian mathematician. A citizen of Bologna, he taught mathematics and astronomy and also worked on military problems. His work included the development of continued fractions and a method for their representation. He was one of many mathematicians who attempted to prove Euclid's fifth postulate.
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Giovanni Ricci
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Giovanni Ricci was an Italian mathematician. He was born and brought up in Florence, where he did his school education. He then moved to Pisa to study mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore . He was an assistant professor at the University of Rome for two years until 1928 when he moved to his alma mater Scuola Normale Superiore, where he was a professor for 8 years and produced research works in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, mathematical analysis, and theory of series, with highly significant results being obtained on the Goldbach conjecture and Hilbert's seventh pr...
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Thomas Abbt
1738 - 1766 (28 years)
Thomas Abbt was a German mathematician and writer. Biography Born in Ulm as the son of a wig-maker, Abbt visited a secondary school in Ulm, then moved in 1756 to study theology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Halle, receiving a Magister degree in 1758. In 1760 he was appointed as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt , where he wrote his most well-known work Vom Tode für's Vaterland .
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Ferdinand Joachimsthal
1818 - 1861 (43 years)
Ferdinand Joachimsthal was a German mathematician. He was born on March 9, 1818, at Goldberg , Silesia and died on April 5, 1861, at Breslau . In the year of his graduation he was appointed teacher at a Realschule in Berlin, and in 1846 was admitted to the philosophical faculty of the university as privatdozent. In 1856, he was appointed professor of mathematics at Halle, and in 1858 at Breslau.
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George Ballard Mathews
1861 - 1922 (61 years)
George Ballard Mathews, FRS was an English mathematician. He was born in London. He studied at the Ludlow Grammar School which had instruction in Hebrew and Sanscrit as well as in Greek and Latin. He proceeded to University College, London where Olaus Henrici made him "realise that mathematics is an inductive science, not a set of rules and formulae." He then took up preparation for Cambridge Mathematical Tripos under the guidance of William Henry Besant. He came out Senior Wrangler for 1883. He was elected a Fellow of St John's College.
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David Livingstone
1813 - 1873 (60 years)
David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. David was the husband of Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century missionary family, Moffat. Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, Livingstone beca...
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Anton Sushkevich
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Anton Kazimirovich Sushkevich was a Russian mathematician and textbook author who expanded group theory to include semigroups and other magmass. Sushkevich attended secondary school in Voronezh and studied in Berlin from 1906 to 1911. There he attended lectures of F. G. Frobenius, Issai Schur, and Hermann Schwarz. Sushkevich studied piano with L. V. Rostropovich, father of Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1906 he was a cello student at Stern Conservatory . In 1911 he moved to Saint Petersburg, graduating from the Imperial University in 1913.
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Bertram Martin Wilson
1896 - 1935 (39 years)
Prof Bertram Martin Wilson FRSE was an English mathematician, remembered primarily as a co-editor, along with G. H. Hardy and P. V. Seshu Aiyar, of Srinivasa Ramanujan's Collected Papers. Life He was born in London on 14 November 1896 the son of Rev Alfred Henry Wilson and his wife, Ellen Elizabeth Vincent.
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Angelina Cabras
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Angelina Cabras was an Italian mathematician and physicist. She earned degrees in mathematics from the University of Turin in 1924 and in physics from the University of Cagliari in 1927. She obtained a position in mathematical physics at Cagliari, later moving to the institute of theoretical mechanics there. Her research concerned higher dimensional rigid body dynamics, the theory of relativity, and inductance.
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Rodolphe Radau
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Jean Charles Rodolphe Radau was an astronomer and mathematician who worked in Paris at the Revue des deux Mondes for most of his life. He was the co-founder of the Bulletin Astronomique. Radau was born in Angerburg, Province of Prussia , and after studying in Königsberg and working on the Three-body problem, he moved to Paris to collaborate with other scientists. In 1871 he was given the Ph.D. in honor of his work in mathematics.
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Henry Perigal
1801 - 1898 (97 years)
Henry Perigal, Jr. FRAS MRI was a British stockbroker and amateur mathematician, known for his dissection-based proof of the Pythagorean theorem and for his unorthodox belief that the moon does not rotate.
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Giulio Carlo de' Toschi di Fagnano
1682 - 1766 (84 years)
Giulio Carlo, Count Fagnano, Marquis de Toschi was an Italian mathematician. He was probably the first to direct attention to the theory of elliptic integrals. Fagnano was born in Senigallia , and also died there.
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Karl Menninger
1898 - 1963 (65 years)
Karl Menninger was a German teacher of and writer about mathematics. His major work was Zahlwort und Ziffer , about non-academic mathematics in much of the world.
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